Season One, Episode Eighteen – “Everyone Has a Cobblepot”
By Jarrod Jones. Not to be outdone by the seventeen episodes that preceded it, the latest episode of Gotham is a reliably mixed bag of an undercooked procedural and a downright surreal gore fest. “Everyone Has a Cobblepot” has a villainous surprise for the three people who remember what happened in Gotham‘s second episode, and actually puts Jim Gordon to good use. Of course, the best news came at the episode’s end, where it was revealed that I don’t have to choke down another episode of Gotham until April 13. (Which, awright.)
WHAT WORKED: This week’s intrigue at the GCPD made a fairly compelling case that – when Gotham chills out with the idiocy – there is plenty of room for drama on this show. Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) didn’t have to dig too deeply to see how compromised most of Gotham’s Finest actually are, and seeing Gordon team up with District Attorney Harvey Dent (Nicholas D’Agosto) to discover how much of that moral quandary stems from Police Commissioner Loeb (Peter Scolari) gave the first half of the episode real meat. It was fleeting, but there’s not denying it… There was at least five solid minutes of show this week.
WHAT DIDN’T: After the momentum of last week’s episode, the “Bruce Wayne vs. Wayne Enterprises” subplot gave way to a lifeless and forgettable “Alfred’s in the hospital” sequence that didn’t promise much for the remainder of Season One, save for another Bruce/Selina team-up, and absolutely no one is sitting around waiting for that.
Colm Feore stands revealed as the Dollmaker – er – Dr. Dalmacher (which sounds suitably ludicrous, so I can’t even be mad about it), but it’s hard to glean any real point to this whole “organ harvesting” subplot for Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett-Smith). Is this going somewhere? Is Gotham‘s long game deliberately convoluted that when all the narrative strings tie together for the season finale, I’ll be all, “say whaaaaa – ?” (The answer is no.)
BEST LINES: “You know, the last time we took a ride together, you were in the trunk. I think I liked that better.” – Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue). Someone give this guy a spinoff already.
BEST WORST MOMENT: Absolutely nothing exceptional occurred in this week’s episode, but there was plenty of awful. Chief amongst the ugly was the mad science behind Dr. Dulmacher, who decided it was time to show Fish what happens to those who fail him by grafting Jeffrey Combs’ head to a female body. (The imagery it demanded was about the most laughably hideous thing Gotham‘s attempted yet.) The look on Combs’ face perfectly encapsulated my own incredulity. What the actual fuck, Gotham.
EPISODE’S MVP: Ben McKenzie. It’s not often that McKenzie’s man-who-will-be-commish has much of an effect on Gotham, but “Everyone Has a Cobblepot” features Jim Gordon as proactive as ever. Though this episode’s crusade to topple Commissioner Loeb’s iron-clad hold over the GCPD took our man down some fairly ridiculous avenues, McKenzie’s square-jawed resolve tempered the insanity just enough to make his story matter. (At least until the final fifteen minutes, anyway…) Now, if the show’s writers would realize that they already have the hero Gotham deserves, Jim Gordon could finally get some respect around here.
TO THE BAT-CAVE:
– Det. Arnold Flass (Dash Mihok) got to spit out a “Jimbo” and I somehow got offended that Gotham thought it had the right to display shades of Batman: Year One.
– Miriam Loeb was portrayed by Nicholle Tom, the vocal actor behind Supergirl and her clone doppelganger Galatea in Justice League Unlimited and Superman: The Animated Series.
– “You’re lucky I have a soft spot for old ladies.” – Oswald Cobblepot (Robin Lord Taylor), in yet another moment where I don’t know if I should say “aw” or “ew”.
– Colm Feore’s presence on Gotham ought to get any comic book nut’s Spidey-Sense a-tingling: Feore played Adrian Toomes in Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Laufey in Thor.
